Review

A conversation with a friend (and a recommendation for her to get one of Michael's holsters) reminded me that I'm long overdue for a follow up on the holster that he and Farmmom conspired to give me.

Re-reading the old post, I see that I was concerned with a slight difference in where I carried and where the holster fit, hoping it would break in. It has, and is as comfortable now as a second skin.

The leather is holding up wonderfully, as is the stitching. It all still looks just as fantastic as the day I got it.

The gun has gotten a little looser than it was, as it broke in, but there has also been a refinish for the PPK since then, so the sandblasting had something to do with it I'm sure.

All in all I am enormously pleased with the holster, and not just because it was a gift. Seriously folks, if you're looking for a quality holster that the maker will stand behind, look into Michael at the link above. Reasonable pricing, quality work, durability and beauty all together. I fully intend to give Michael more of my business in the future!

Memorials

Just got the invite for the annual cookout and balloon release for my little brother and the two other kids we lost that summer.

Most likely, I'm going to be out of town that weekend, but I will do my best to manage to release a balloon for them.

If I can't manage it that Sunday, I'll do something the day he died, which isn't for another month or so.

Two years. Two years of tears, joys, stresses, life. I still see his face in crowds sometimes. Just out of the blue I'll see someone that looks sort of like him and even though I know it isn't him, my heart skips a beat and I miss him all over again. Worse is when I hear someone laugh like him.

We miss him, and the other two. Last year probably close to two hundred people showed up for the balloon release. Everyone had a picnic meal at the park, and told stories on all the boys, and cried, and hugged. I chased R's youngest kids and made them laugh, hugged her oldest and got her to smile. Teased family and friends and remembered my baby brother.

He'll always be with those who knew him, because he was just that kind of personality. And he'll always be with me, in my heart and memorialized in the tattoo that R and I share. Whether or not I make it to the ceremonies that people have put together to memorialize him and the others, I honor all of them in my own way, in my own time.

The number of cracks on my heart for those that I've lost has grown the last several years. They haven't healed, I don't think they ever do. But I have gotten better able to bear them, and I'm proud to do so. Those metaphorical scars are proof that people have had an impact on my life and I on theirs. Those scars tell me that I learned things from those people that I won't ever forget. The pain of losing someone you love is horrible, but the knowledge that you are the kind of person to care enough about people to be hurt when they're gone can only make you stronger.

Some days, I'm pretty certain that I'm close to becoming She-Hulk from all the stronger I've been made. And some days I hear my grandpa's voice on the wind, or feel Sugar's hands on mine as I'm cooking. Sometimes it's Mamaw inviting the whole world into her home during holidays, if they don't have anywhere else to go. And sometimes it's Jeff, calling me a dork. And in all those things, what I hear or feel is always "I love you."

And I can't help but smile.

Then and Now

Remember this guy?

Now he looks like this:

46lbs at last weigh in. He's grown! 

Planty Goodness

So, recently, I've been a bit caught up in mom's spring plantapalooza. She's starting seeds for her garden this year inside and set up a grow light system. Now, granted, there are a lot of food plants that do well as a potted plant and every little bit helps, but since I'm going to be moving to an apartment soon, I figure something a little hardier is on the agenda for me. 

Enter a tiny tropical tree:

This is my new Fukien Tea tree (yes, Farmdad has already made all the fuckin tea tree jokes, you can rest assured he's on the case.) It's a little tropical so it will be all right inside without a "winter" so to speak. It also produces little white flowers that turn into red berries, so it's pretty. 

I had it shipped, and kudos to the nursery it arrived in good health and still moist. This plant likes fast draining soil and doesn't like overwatering, so I repotted it into cactus soil, that being the best draining stuff I could find easily. A lot of people use this for bonsai, and I'll probably do some bonsai like maintenance on it when it starts perking up and growing, because I'm not interested in something I need a dolly to move, I want to keep it small ish. I also used a terracotta pot for a few reasons. Reason one, it was cheap. As am I, mostly. Second, the tea tree likes a humid environment and can be a little picky about it's water, so I figure the pot will help me two ways... first, evaporation from the pot (and the larger tray I've put underneath with the pebbles) to raise the humidity around it since I live in dry-airistan, and second, it can absorb some moisture from the soil and release it back slowly as the soil dries out. Hopefully this will make the plant happy so it can thrive, since I want it bigger than it is, if not as big as it can grow.

I also got a little terra cotta worm thingy to help keep an eye on the soil moisture (and because it was cute and under a dollar.) I have named him Concerned Worm, because he looks concerned about the plant:

He'll change color as the soil dries out and water is needed. Right now, I've still got tons of healthy green leaves, though Tiny Tim The Tea Tree is showing some stress from the shipping and repotting. I've set up an auxiliary lamp with a daylight spectrum bulb, because mom's garden plants get first call on her lighting system and it's a simple way to give Tim even more light, because light equals food. When the weather settles out and stays warm I'll leave it outside because sun is even better than lighting systems, but the cold nights we've had would kill it.

Watching a plant grow, researching the best ways to care for it, it's interesting and relaxing. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna leave Concerned Worm to his watch, and get some stuff done around the house.

Blah

I'm just blah tonight.

Between the rampant idiocy about the Boston Marathon bombing (nobody but the investigators actually knows diddly yet folks, and it's gonna stay that way for a while... somebody might guess right but they're pulling it out of their ass) and the super rampant idiocy about the failure to pass the new gun control bills, I'm about ready to resign from the internet.

Don't get me wrong, my heart goes out to those in Boston effected by the bombing and I sincerely hope for speedy recoveries for the injured, I'm just tired of every moron and conspiracy theorist with a keyboard deciding they know exactly what happened, and expounding at length. If someone who works with explosives every day can't really guess at what the mechanism was (Yes, Mike, I read your Facebook posts)  then you can bet your ass the media is clueless.

And as far as the outrage over the Senate not closing "the gun show loophole" ?

All I have to say is: Joe Blow doesn't get to masturbate in public, why should the legislature?

If ya'll need me I'll be over there with a book until the stampede is over, or something interesting/funny happens to me.

Ah, Kitty...

When I was 15, I stole a cat. 

Yes, I said that, and yes it means what you think it means. I stole someone's ten week old kitten, with malice aforethought. 

You see, they'd gotten her from one of the inevitable stray got a holt of fluffy pairings, the litters that get ignored until they're weaned, which is followed by a desperate attempt to give the kittens away. 

So, right, they gave a kitten a home, awesome. Problem is, like so many kittens in a dusty clime that don't get much attention and ew get them out of my house they can live in the shed.... she had an upper respiratory infection. Which, by itself, is usually not a big deal. They're snotty and their eyes goober up for a while and then they get over it. This kitten, however, had a bad upper respiratory infection. Like, eyes swollen shut bad. 

So, when I saw this, I told them "Take her out to the vet. He'll probably give you a fifteen dollar bottle of antibiotics for it. Last stuff I had to get from him smelled like bubblegum so it's not even hard to give." 

And I went away for a week. The next time I visited, her poor kitten eyes were still swollen and goobered shut. 

So I stole the cat. 

That first trip to the vet, for the sixteen dollar bottle of liquid antibiotics (still the bubblegum, and before we finished all you had to do was shake it and she'd come running from the other end of the house) was just the beginning. A stolen cat always costs more than one honestly acquired.

Anyway, I brought the little bundle of fluff home and started getting her better, and it wasn't long at all before she felt better enough to show some personality. She liked mom, as all cats do those who are just allergic enough to be mildly miserable with prolonged close contact.

One night, my loving mother was sitting at the table, having a glass of wine, with the kitten romping and investigating and generally being a kitten in her lap. She looked down, and started to scold the little blue-eyed furball for nosing around on the table (an ironclad rule for all FarmFam animals, Thou Shalt Keep Thy Nose Off My Damn Table) and suddenly busted out laughing. Because, you see, the kitten had her head shoved into mom's glass of wine and was drinking it. 

So that's how she got her name. Her Royal Highness Princess White Zinfandell. Ziff for short. 

Ziff came to a truce with the FarmDogs of that era, though it was a cautious one. I don't believe she ever forgave them for thinking it was funny to nose her and knock her tail over teakettle when she was a kitten.

She slept on my pillow, in a c-for-cat fitted around my head and I learned to sleep with her that way because no matter how many times I moved her she moved back, and if I annoyed her enough she'd fall back on her first preference for sleeping position, which was draped over my face. 

Once I relaxed to the inevitable, the purr vibrating through my head was actually sort of soothing. 

She was three years and some change old (and had been through an eye surgery, the follow up of which caused her to lose her taste for being picked up and carried.... well, if you figured out that picking up meant getting steroid cream smeared in your sore eye would you like it??) when I brought home FarmDog.

At first, it seemed like Ziff was going to fall into the same wary truce she had with the other dogs, but it didn't take long for her to figure out a couple of important facts....

First, that FarmDog was a young and impressionable puppy.

Second, that if you bluff em hard enough when they're little, they'll believe it forever. 

So FarmDog became Ziff's dog. Her favorite dog, privileged to be near Her Highness and tolerated to a greater degree than the others. This may have been Ziff's relaxing to the inevitable since it soon became clear that she was going to have to share the bed with the dog whether she wanted to or not.

Before FarmDog was even a year old, they had a grand relationship, to the point that while Ziff was sitting on the foot stool (AKA her throne) FarmDog could come up and rest her chin on it, without getting chased off. 

Of course, it was fifty fifty whether Ziff would groom her nose and face or reach out with one majestic paw and sink all five claws into the top of FarmDog's head, to lift the loose skin there while watching dispassionately. I think it was a test of loyalty, personally. FarmDog got to where she never even twitched, just gave Ziff sad eyes till the cat got bored with it and settled down to grooming. FarmDog learned some tricks too. If Ziff ignored her when she came to The Throne, she'd wait patiently till the ignoring got pointed (in cat, that means turning away to groom yourself) and then lunge in for a full-body lick, and back out and away before she could be caught. 

This usually resulted in whatever humans were present laughing themselves silly, and the cat giving an indignant glare at the room in general. And another Loyalty Test at the earliest opportunity.

Ziff is still with us, even though she's pushing fourteen. She's still spry, most days. She's an old cat though and has her stiff and sore days. 

Since I got back to the Homestead her favorite place has pretty much been here:

Curled up on my bed. Or, if possible, two feet lower, where I usually lean against the wall with my laptop. (Why yes, that is three different blankets you see on my bed. One of them is electric. I'm a wimp, I have never denied this.)

The Schnauzers seem to have convinced her that uneasy truce is the best way to go with dogs, though it may be that she's just that old and grumpy, but she hasn't been dealing with "her" dog the same way she used to. Unless they're doing their loyalty rituals when I can't see them. Or, her uneasy truce with Biter and Jezebelle may be because when she manages to catch a mouse, they steal it, and she's not sure she's got the vinegar left in her to properly lesson them on manners.

She's lost a lot of weight the last couple of years, but it's just being an old cat. I was sitting here looking at them, Ziff in the spot she'd claimed for herself, and FarmDog on any open spot of bed that she thought might not get reclaimed by me for long enough to start a good nap, and I realized that, once the next move is accomplished, these two probably won't ever be together again.

When I went to college, it was generally agreed that Ziff wouldn't cope well with a move. She's a strictly indoor cat, by her own preference. I tried to interest her in outside when she was young and she followed me out of politeness a couple of times, but always went back in with a look of "what in the world are you THINKING going out there?!?" at the first opportunity.

At this point, I'm pretty sure a move would kill her, just from the stress. Besides... she's lived in the same house for the vast majority of her life. She stayed when I left. While I'm sure from the instant recognition and resumption of me being her person when I came back (she still likes to sleep wrapped around my head and lounges on the back of my chair and attempts to annoy me into paying attention to her at every opportunity) she'd love to be with me, I don't think she would want to go with me.

And for all practical purposes, she's coming to the end of her run. She's still pretty happy, if a little slow and occasionally sore. She gets attention and food, and gets to annoy dad. She's got her picked people that she comes out for (yes, folks, she was in the house at Blogorado, she just chose not to make an appearance... too much bustle for her tastes) and they give her attention in the age old trade for cat hair.

But she's old. She's had a good run of it and I don't regret a second of it (even if the eye surgery thing freaked me out a little. Look, I know she was just anesthetized but mostly they look like they're sleeping then, and it's not all that freaky even if they are limp like a corpse. But limp like a corpse and eyes open and staring made me nervous. She looked dead, and I had to keep checking to make sure she wasn't.)

So she won't go with me on the next grand adventure, and there's a good chance that she won't be here the next time FarmDog makes it this way. Or hell, FarmDog is getting old too. She's getting white around her muzzle and on her feet that wasn't always there, and there's the seizure thing. It might be FarmDog that goes first. Either way, once I take the next step, it's probably the last chapter of A Cat and Her Dog.

Kind of sad, actually.

Wild Animals Are... Wild

BRM posted a story about a man in Utah that got knocked against a fence by a bison, because he was dense enough to chuck rocks at it. Since he was taking pictures, presumably he did this to get the buffalo to look at him.

Now, this is a symptom that I see a lot, whenever I'm anywhere there are animals and the public, pretty much.

Darwinism has been thwarted to such a great degree that a large segment of our population has lost all ability to detect no-bullshit danger.

Folks in the gunblogging circle talk about this a lot in terms of keeping an eye out for criminals and knowing which way to jump when TSHTF. But honestly, I think it illustrates much more easily with stuff like this.

So this brain surgeon is in a state park, where they have bison, and bison are awesome and he wants a picture. Fantastic. But a picture of a grazing bison isn't good enough, nooo. He's got to have one of the critter looking at him.

So what does he do? He puts a fence at his back (leaving him handily stuck between a barricade and an animal that makes wolves think twice unless they have some extra advantage) and starts tossing rocks.

Ok, let me pause for a moment here and explain something, if you haven't been to one of the state or national parks that has resident buffalo. The American Bison has become the icon of the west. Everyone knows how there used to be millions of them, and now there's not. So when they get to see them, they ooo and ahhh a lot, and stand there like morons clicking pictures for half an hour. Meanwhile the bison go about their business completely ignoring the humans. You know why? Because they're used to them. Definitely NOT because they like them.

So, they're accustomed, and they ignore. That is, until you do something they aren't accustomed to, or something that annoys them. Like chuck rocks at them.

That guy in Utah? He's damned lucky that was a chain link fence at his back, and not a pipe or barbed wire fence. He's also damned lucky that that bison gave him the equivalent of "dude, knock it off" and wasn't seriously peeved. If the animal had been serious about it, I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that the man had been pushed through that chain link fence, to ooze out the other side like play-dough.

Please remember here... when in rut, bison males fight over females. That big hump? It's not fat. That's muscle. You know why they have that big hump of muscle right over their shoulders? Cause their heads are freaking heavy, and they like to hit each other with them. That muscle gives them the power to whack into each other repeatedly. It also helps hold up their skull since it's thick.... again for the whacking.

If that bison had been more than annoyed, dude would be dead. We're entirely too squishy and slow to change a buffalo's mind once it's made up. Luck, and the fact that we pretty much actively prevent these geniuses from either learning or becoming a shining example of What Not To Do has resulted in a human gene pool that I'm pretty sure could use some chlorine.

Another example, from the last time I was at the zoo. Observing the cougar habitat, I noted that the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo did something nifty for their cats, they built a section of the enclosure that went out over a tunnel the visitors could walk through. That tunnel has a glass ceiling, and in the enclosure is a sturdy branch to overhang.

I watched a group, with children, approach the enclosure. Some woman put one of the kids up on a post so that he could see the cats better. One of the cats was busily gnawing on a bone from a pile hoarded in a corner, but when the child was lifted up into sight, wandered over.

"Oh look, he likes you!"

At this point the kid, being smarter than the adult, is uneasy, because the cat is pacing in front of him. The kind of pacing you might expect to see if you hauled a quarter of a deer up and dropped it outside the fence. Kid freaks out, she puts him down, and off they go through the tunnel.

And the cat follows, pacing out on the overhanging branch and looking down at them through the glass. And they ooo and ahh, and say how neat it is, and again I hear "He likes you!"

Yeah. For dinner.

I have very little doubt that the designers of that enclosure had any illusions about what being above slow, squishy meat sacks means to a cougar. And it is a neat thing to watch them walk along that branch like they were on the ground, so everyone wins. But that window wasn't put there for the zoo patrons, oh no, that window was put there for the cats, for their entertainment and stimulation. Because when a cougar is looking down on a human, it sees dinner.

The woman was completely oblivious to this, to all of the body language of the cat or any sense of "oh if this fence weren't here, that thing would happily gnaw on my thighbone for days."

One more quick example from a trip I took to Yellowstone years back. Late August... breeding season for many wild animals with long gestation, especially herbivores, so that the little ones are starting to come off the teat about the time there's plenty of good green spring grass.

In Yellowstone all of the animals are pretty accustomed to humans. I swear I saw a moose there my first time through that deliberately posed for the flocks of people who had pulled off the road to take pictures and gawk (of course I was one of them, how often do you see a posing moose??)

Anyway, it's the same with the bison, and the antelope, and the elk. They're pretty chill with voices and cameras and people at a certain distance. Anyway, this trip, I was driving along one of the roads, going to waterfalls, and I see a bunch of cars pulled off and parked. This, in Yellowstone, is the international symbol of Wildlife In View Of The Road.

Glance over, and it's a herd of elk in a meadow. Just happened to be someone pulling out of the little pull-off area facing the meadow as I went by, so I decided to whip in and get a couple of pictures, because I hadn't seen any elk yet that trip and the bull was impressive.

Grabbed the camera, climbed out of the car and used it as a tripod since I'd need the zoom, and I hear off to one side the rustling of medium heavy paper.

When you go to Yellowstone they give you a map of the park, with all the easily accessible interesting bits marked. On the back of the map are drawings and names of the most common wildlife, everything from bison to marmots. (Or, that's the way it was when I was last there, they may have changed the design by now.)

"I don't know, I think they're some kind of deer." I hear from the direction of the paper rustling. Ok, so not everyone knows what an elk looks like, fine. When I glanced over, she looked like Mrs Suburban Housewife Supreme Model. One of those people who buys what they think they should wear to go to "the wilderness" to go to Yellowstone, and ends up looking like a moron in all the wrong brand-new gear. Her husband hand the camera.

He grunted at her a bit and futzed with it, trying to get a good clear shot I guess, it was a decent distance.

"Get closer, just walk out there!"

At this point, friends, I'm afraid I contributed to thwarting Darwinism. But I wasn't sure if the elk would get in trouble for killing a clueless tourist or if I'd have to do paperwork because I saw it.

I just wandered over and told him "No, don't walk out there."

They both looked at me like I was something they'd never had to scrape off their boots before, of course.

I quickly explained that those were elk, a bull and his harem, and that this was mating season, which meant that the bull would be very touchy and very likely to hurt badly anything that he thought was getting too close to his lady friends. Then I went back to my car, in time to see one of the rangers pull up.

So I waited for him to get out of his vehicle, and let him know he might want to keep an eye on things until the elk decided to wander off, since I had heard someone mention something about walking out into the meadow to get better pictures.

The ranger, not being a moron, went sort of pale and mumbled something about hating mating season.

I wandered off back to my car and the happy knowledge that I'd prevented myself from having to call someone a fucking moron in an official report.

Human beings, as a species, are weak, watered down predators. Take a kitten that has lived in a nice comfy room all its life and been fed lovely food every day, drop it in the woods with no other protection or weapons than it was born with, and it has a better chance of surviving for a week than most humans in the same situation. The kitten will, at least, have the sense to realize that shit out there wants to eat it.

Humans aren't at the top of the food chain because we're better than other animals, we're at the top of the food chain because we're smarter than other animals. Or, we were. Unfortunately I don't think that the trend has continued.